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Ah, this takes me back. HLA really helped me to learn the basics back in the day. To be honest nowadays my assembly skills are mainly read-only. Usually when I'm debugging some weird crash or looking to see how something gets optimized (or doesn't). Still, I'm very glad to have learned.

If nothing else, it rid me of the notion that C is "portable assembly".

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Veteran assembler folks very likely still remember the good old Randy (Randall Hyde) vs Betov (René Tournois) debate in alt.lang.asm. e.g: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.lang.asm/c/gYJ4KYpczSc?pli=1

I like HLA (never use that for production though, since I'm a mobile app dev). Too bad is not actively developed anymore.

Oh yes those were the days. Such discussions would never be allowed in modern forums/discord. It was a kind of assembly heyday. HLA, FASM, NASM, RosAsm... most of them seem to have either disappeared or stagnated.

Yes, back in those days (TASM fanboy here), I had lots of fun doing stuff in Assembly.

Also readonly over here, who can manage the amount of variations on modern ISAs.

Still, even when occasionally debugging JIT code it is helpful to at least being able to read it.

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